Town in Warwickshire, England
Rugby
A schoolboy supposedly grabbed a football and ran, and a whole sport took the name of a Warwickshire market town. Rugby also gave the world the jet engine test and a radio hub.
Key information
- County
- Warwickshire
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Rugby School, the birthplace of rugby football, and the first run of Frank Whittle's jet engine
- What locals are called
- Rugbeians (Old Rugbeians for former pupils of the school)
- Famous people
- Rupert Brooke, Lewis Carroll, Salman Rushdie, Frank Whittle
- Football clubs
- Rugby Town
About Rugby
The boy who (maybe) picked up the ball
In 1823, so the story goes, a pupil at Rugby School named William Webb Ellis got fed up with the rules of football, scooped up the ball and ran with it. A sport was born, and the town gave it its name. Historians have argued about the tale for well over a century, and it only appeared in print decades after the event. A plaque on the wall by The Close, put up in 1895, still marks the spot. The Rugby World Cup trophy is named the Webb Ellis Cup. Whatever really happened, Rugby School did help turn a loose schoolyard game into a code with its own rules. Other schools and clubs followed, and the Rugby Football Union was founded in 1871.
The shop that made the ball
Walk down St Matthew's Street and you reach the shop where the sport's most famous object was made. William Gilbert was a boot and shoemaker who began supplying balls to the school in 1823, the year the Gilbert business dates its foundation. The oval shape came from the inflated pig's bladder inside the leather case. Gilbert's firm turned that practical quirk into a worldwide brand, and rugby balls carrying its name are still associated with the town. The old premises now house a museum devoted to the history of the game and its equipment.
A school that shaped a nation's idea of schooldays
Rugby School, founded in 1567, became a national name under headmaster Thomas Arnold in the 1830s and 1840s. His reforms and his emphasis on character influenced public schools across Britain. The school also gave literature one of its best-known boarding-school stories. Thomas Hughes, an old boy, set Tom Brown's School Days (1857) here. The list of former pupils is striking. Lewis Carroll was a pupil, as was the First World War poet Rupert Brooke, who was born in the town in 1887 and whose father was a housemaster. Salman Rushdie also went to school here.
Where the jet age warmed up
Rugby was an engineering town long before it was a tourist one. The British Thomson-Houston works made electrical equipment, and in April 1937 the first test run of Frank Whittle's experimental jet engine took place at the BTH site. The engine was a rough-looking prototype and it ran with alarming noise and instability. It was the start of the turbojet that would power aircraft around the world. Whittle was born in Coventry, just up the road, and the link between the two places is part of how the Midlands became the cradle of British aviation engineering.
The town that spoke to the world
Outside Rugby, on the Hillmorton side, stood one of the great radio stations of the twentieth century. Rugby Radio Station opened in 1926, and in 1927 it helped carry the first transatlantic telephone service between Britain and the United States. The main masts reached about 250 metres and could be seen for miles across the flat Warwickshire countryside. Their signals carried time pulses and long-range communications for decades. Eight of the twelve tall masts were demolished in June 2004, and the last four came down in August 2007. The site has since been redeveloped for housing.
A railway crossroads
Rugby grew fast with the railways. Its junction brought lines from London, the north-west, Peterborough and Leamington together, and travellers routinely changed trains here on long journeys. That busy junction helped factories, cement works and electrical engineering settle around the town. Rugby remains an important stop on the West Coast Main Line. For football fans, Rugby Town is the local club. Everyone else comes to see where the other kind of football began.