Last updated 12:03, Thursday, 27 March 2008

IN 1823, during a game of soccer at Rugby School , 16-year-old William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it towards his opponents' goal line.

And so the game of rugby was born and indelibly marked down the said Master Ellis as the sport’s first character.

For the next 150 years or more the game continued to spew-out those characters.

You know the type – often played through into his 50s, had tales to tell for every occasion – of the number of pints supped before a game and then again afterwards, usually on a tour game,; knew every ribald song backwards and had lost count of the number of teeth he had collected or lost during a scrum.

But those kind of players flourished when rugby was more of a social game, before the professional era and while the modern-day international player can build-up a fund-of stories for when he retires and treads the after-dinner circuit, the term character isn’t really appropriate.

Jackie Moffat is a character – at 71 years young, one of the most instantly recognised faces in Cumbria rugby union.

He’s been around the county scene for decades and rather sadly has decided to cut back. Moresby’s county representative since 1964 he’s announced that he will be standing down from the position.

Apparently he was asked to take on the job in the year when Joe Pattinson of Moresby was elected county president – and he’s continued to do the job for 44 years.

That must make him one of, if not the longest serving representative on the county.

Apparently now that all the meetings are held at Penrith Jackie is feeling it more difficult to make the 100-mile round trip. He’s slowing down, and so too are the cars that he drives!

Moresby will need to find a new county representative but Jackie insists that he won’t be lost to his village club where he has been a key member for over 50 years.

“I’m still on the committee and I want to be involved as much as I can in keeping the club going. There aren’t many of us these days and we have to do what we can to keep it going” he confided this week.

Jackie was well past his 50th birthday when he stopped playing for Moresby but has no idea how many matches he played for the village club.

He never played for Cumberland – because I wasn’t good enough – but he did make three appearances for Cumberland amateur rugby league.

And thereby hangs another tale. Because of his involvement with Distington and Workington Town A team he was banned from playing rugby union for 12 months.

“The climate was different then. You didn’t play both codes and I was seen to have been a naughty boy,” he recalls.

Now his 12-year-old grandson is playing for Hensingham amateur rugby league club and has the opportunity to also play age group with rugby union clubs.

Times have changed and so they should. Young lads should play both codes regularly before deciding which suits them better.

But if Jackie Moffat wasn’t good enough to play for Cumberland, he was certainly good enough to be a key man in the Cumbria team which won the County Championship in 1997.

It was a measure of Jackie’s standing within the ranks of those players that a dozen of the players who triumphed at Twickenham against Somerset met-up for a special presentation to the Moresby stalwart last year.

After 35 years with the county rugby union teams – from colts level through to the Championship-winning team – there was a general feeling that his services hadn’t been sufficiently recognised. That was how the Cumbria kit-man came to take centre-stage at the final County Championship Shield game last May.

Mark Richardson, captain of the Cumbria team which lifted the County Championship trophy made a special presentation of a piece of porcelain at Bower Park after the game with Notts, Lincs and Derby. The players had a collection among themselves and from the proceeds Jackie bought himself a watch which he has specially inscribed.

Richardson, team manager of the Cumbria squad said that he felt enough hadn’t been made of Jackie’s outstanding service to the county when he finished in 2006.

“It was appropriate to have him there when we had a players re-union, ten years after the Twickenham win and I just felt we had to do something to mark his efforts for Cumbria rugby union,” says Richardson.

Jackie recalls now: “I was a bit miffed at the time I finished with the county but the gesture by Mark and the players more than made-up.

“Now it’s the end of another era as I’m stepping down from the county reps job with Moresby but it’s like everything else, the memories never end.”