The central English town of Rugby is playing up its heritage as the World Cup in the sport that bears its name kicks off Friday.
While the game of rugby has spread around the world, many are surprised to learn that Rugby the place even exists.
“I think we’ve been pretty quiet about the fact that we’re the only place to have given our name to an international sport,” Mark Pawsey told AFP, by the town’s statue of Webb Ellis, the schoolboy after whom the World Cup trophy is named.
He said he is often faced with astonishment abroad about the rugby links of this Warwickshire market town of 70,000 people.
“The clue’s in the name,” said Pawsey, a Conservative Party MP who represents the surrounding constituency.
“We think the Rugby World Cup gives us a great opportunity to welcome rugby fans and visitors.
“They will see the pride that we’ve got in the fact that we started this game.”
The sport originated at Rugby School, an elite private school founded in 1567, which costs up to £33,000 ($51,000, 45,000 euros) a year to attend.
The game, simply called football at the school, emerged on The Close, the immaculate expanse of grass directly in front of the school and its chapel.
– ‘Coffin cart’ and five-day matches –
The trophy the 20 World Cup teams are competing for, the William Webb Ellis Cup, is named after the schoolboy credited with first catching the ball and running forward with it in 1823.
“I always say the Webb Ellis story is rather like mythical history and the Old Testament,” Rugby School headmaster Peter Green told AFP.
Green said early matches could feature more than 200 players and last for up to five days.
“It took until about the 1860s for the boys to decide that matches should not be any longer than three days,” he said.
The school museum houses early caps and the “coffin cart”, in which injured boys were wheeled off the pitch.
Rugby football fanned out from the school, being taken by masters to other schools and by former pupils throughout the British empire and beyond.
Australian rules football and American football can directly trace their origins to Rugby School.
The school’s rugby team is still going strong.
“Unfortunately for us, all the other schools that play us… always try really, really hard” on the sport’s hallowed turf, said Green, standing by the goalposts on The Close.
Special World Cup tours are running until November 1, but normally, visits are only on a Saturday at the functioning school.
“We don’t overplay the history because we are an academic school and rugby is only a very small part of our curriculum,” said Green.
– Balls still hand-stitched in town –
The town hosts the Webb Ellis Rugby Football Museum, housed in the building where the Gilbert family made balls for the school from 1842.
Gilbert are the manufacturers of the official 2015 Rugby World Cup match balls.
Traditional leather balls are still hand-stitched in the building, where former shoemaker Peter Prince, 49, makes two per day, which sell for £34.99 ($54, 48 euros) each.
“I’m carrying on the legacy,” he said. “It’s made in exactly the same way.”
“They are the only true rugby balls because they’re the only balls that are actually made in Rugby,” he told AFP.
The museum has memorabilia and some of the oldest rugby balls in existence.
Several hundred people a week normally visit the museum, but this has risen to thousands in recent weeks as World Cup tourists flood in.
“If you’re here in England, why wouldn’t you come to Rugby, the birthplace of the game?”, said Phil Blundell, the museum manager.
Even though it is not staging any World Cup matches, the town has been granted host city status.
Anyone wanting to catch a game could watch the town’s side, The Rugby Football Club, one of three teams in England permitted to wear all-white, along with Rugby School and the national side.