Football's Founding Father

Stephen Roberts looks back at the life of Ebenezer Cobb Morley, the Surrey man who codified the rules of football more than 150 years ago.

The ball shot through the air like an artillery shell before arresting its progress by thwacking into the back of the net. It was another goal for the beautiful game, a competitive team sport that has its origins in Surrey.

We need to go back a bit to the birth of a gentleman with the Dickensian-sounding name of Ebenezer Cobb Morley. He emerged on August 16 1831, in Hull, to parents Ebenezer Morley – a minister – and Hannah (née Cobb). Judging by a portrait of the adult Ebenezer, he had something of the Jimmy Hill about him (entirely apt as Hill was another great innovator and driving force in the game). I believe this may be the only known picture of Ebenezer and that a framed copy hangs on the wall at the Football Association(FA) shows how important this man is to the origins and history of the game.

Cobb Morley was a keen sportsman, including football, rowing, athletics and hunting (he kept a pack of beagles and for half-a-century hunted with the Surrey Union Foxhounds) and went on to be regarded as the ‘father’ of both the FA and the modern game of football. He earned his living as a solicitor and Justice of the Peace (JP), but would leave Hull when he was 22, and head south.

We know that Cobb Morley had arrived in Barnes (then a Surrey borough) by 1858, when he was aged 27 and a solicitor practicing in the Temple, in London. Four years later, in 1862, he’d formed Barnes FC, a club that would be a founder-member of the FA (1863), and one of the strongest teams in England. Cobb Morley was club captain for around a decade and quickly displayed his ‘dualism’, as he was also secretary of the Barnes and Mortlake Regatta from 1862 to 1880, an event that was as popular as Henley in its day and is back on the calendar today.